Do men flash while women burn and burn?

Wednesday 27 May 2009 07:34 BST

I recently attended a rowdy dinner with Tracey Emin. At about 2am, she began to do her impression of her cat Docket, miaowing piteously until her boyfriend obliged and organised a taxi for Hello Kitty, aka Britain's most successful female artist.

I'm similarly baffled by her pronouncements about the differences between male and female creativity ahead of the opening of her new show, Those Who Suffer Love.

Women, she maintains with all the confidence of a 45-year-old artist with a million pounds-plus bank balance, "go on getting better. It's like a light bulb, women burn and burn and burn, with men it's just one big flash.

At about 40, a male artist has this massive ejaculation and then the work - though not the prices - goes down. It goes back to the sex thing: women keep coming and coming, men just do it once. It's a metaphor for life".

While there are indeed male artists, writers and film-makers who seem to descend into self-parody in their richer and less vulnerable years (step forward Damien Hirst and Woody Allen), if a man said this about women, he would be branded horribly sexist.

For her part, Tracey embroidered a tent with the names of "Everyone I have ever slept with".

None of them I would imagine would be thrilled to read that men can only "come once" - whether artistically or in the conventional way.

And what about Lucian Freud - unstoppable, apparently, in every way. Or Shakespeare and Yeats, who got better and better the more they addressed intimations of their own mortality?

Nonetheless, forget logic, I admire the way she continues to caterwaul that there's no way her own light could be snuffed out just yet - surely a great fear for any artist who becomes a sensation, as she did, in her mid-30s.

There's no shortage of women who fit her energy-saving "light bulb" bill: Annie Leibowitz, 60 this year, who gets the budget for a small independent movie to take a single photograph; Emin's contemporary Sam Taylor-Wood; Carol Ann Duffy, who wrote her most admired work to date in her late 40s; Georgia O'Keeffe, who worked for close to a century ...

On the other hand, the idea that men burn themselves out is far too pat to be helpful. Sun-tanned and world famous, Picasso loafed around Antibes and juggled as many women as he did canvases in his 80s as in his 20s.

In 2001 Salman Rushdie wrote Fury about his new wife and the idea of a muse - about being entranced by a woman with a beauty so arresting that joggers ran into trees in Central Park.

It's often hard to tell whether the emotional chaos the heavy-hitters have dragged in their wake is a by-product of their genius or the condition they need for it to flourish.

That's not to say the artist's dependency on a supply of fresh sexual or emotional material is pleasant to behold.

One of the most monstrous muse/artist relationships was between Edie Sedgwick and Andy Warhol, who cruelly termed her "Taxi", suggesting that, like a yellow cab, she could be hired and told what do.

Emin's tent commented in part on the way every misspent night or meaningful relationship is material for an artist.

Her seemingly naive neon signs, with their bald statements of feeling, pulsate, too, with the same frequency of a human heart. For that matter, even her cat impression is perfectly observed.

Sex might be a good metaphor for, as she says, creativity, and for life, but it's no more than that.

It doesn't matter if the artist is a man or woman: it's rare for a work or art (even an unmade bed) to be created with the unthinking passion that might have been the inspiration.